"a deep meditation on fractured origins and the process of remaking" Eileen Chong

"Brown's postcardssing crisp Guangzhou mornings and hints of dry Australian sunsets"Sam Wagan Watson

A hoarding Chinesegrandmother fills her home with objects, unable to distinguish between thevalue of things. Meanwhile, her Asian-Australian grandson travels to China forthe first time, wary of the revelations that the trip might offer, as he triesto make sense of his own Chinese and Anglo-Australian background. In Guangzhou,Kaiping, Shanghai, and Beijing, amidst the incessant construction andconsumption of twenty-first-century China, a shadowy heritage reveals andwithholds itself, while the suburbs he knows from back home are threaded into thecities he visits, forming an intricately braided Chinese-Australianinheritance. 

LachlanBrown grew up in Macquarie Fields in South West Sydney. His first collection, Limited Cities (Giramondo, 2012), wascommended for the Mary Gilmore Award. His poems have been shortlisted andhighly commended for the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, the Canberra Poetry Prize,the Newcastle Poetry Prize, the Judith Wright Poetry Prize, and the BlakePoetry Prize. He teaches literature at Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga.